With rapidly growing of user's needs for accessing digital contents everywhere, various communication technologies have been developed for transmission of the digital contents. These communication technologies may be developed for different environments, different transmission speeds and/or different user requirements. In addition, several medium access control (MAC) protocols are established based on different communication standards, which define different communication methods based on heterogeneous mediums. For example, IEEE 1901 communication standard is used for power line (PLC), IEEE 802.11 communication standard is used for wireless communication (i.e. WiFi), IEEE 802.3 communication standard is used for Ethernet, and Multimedia over Coax Alliance (MoCA) communication standard is used for coaxial cables, and so on.
As a result, a MAC abstraction sub-layer is developed for convergence of these various media. Please refer to FIG. 1, which is a schematic diagram of an exemplary communication device 10 in a data plane. The communication device 10 may be a mobile phone, laptop, tablet computer, electronic book, modem, or portable computer system, and uses various media for communication. In FIG. 1, the MAC abstraction sub-layer is arranged between an upper layer and a plurality of MAC types of a MAC layer corresponding to a plurality of communication standards. The upper layer can be a network layer, a transport layer, an application layer or any layer responsible for processing the signalings and the packets received from the MAC abstraction sub-layer, and signalings and packets to be transmitted via the MAC abstraction sub-layer. The plurality of MAC types of the MAC layer may include Ethernet, WiFi, PLC and MoCA complied with to the IEEE 802.3 communication standard, IEEE 802.11 communication standard, IEEE 1901 communication standard and MoCA communication standard, respectively.
However, with current MAC abstraction sub-layer architecture, the MAC abstraction sub-layer is incapable to know what the underlying MAC type (e.g. Ethernet, WiFi, PLC or MoCA) of the MAC layer is. Thus, the MAC abstraction sub-layer cannot well control the MAC layer of the communication device. For example, the MAC abstraction sub-layer may configure improper parameters to the MAC layer due to uncertain underlying MAC type of the MAC layer, causing an invalid configuration or system error in the communication device.